Ursula Bloom

Ursula was born in Essex, but as a child lived in Whitchurch, Warwickshire, where her father, James Harvey Bloom, was the Rector of the village. She went on to write books about his work into their family history.

Ursula published over 500 books in her lifetime, an achievement that once won her recognition in the Guinness Book of Records. She wrote many of her novels under pseudonyms - Sheila Burns, Mary Essex, Rachel Harvey, Deborah Mann, Lozania Prole and Sara Sloane.

Her work was predominantly romantic, although her first book, Tiger, privately printed, was written when she was seven years old. She was encouraged to write by a family friend, a well-known author of the time - Marie Corelli.

Born into the fringes of middle class, with aspirations of grandeur but little money, Ursula became a master of story-telling in her own life - keeping up appearances with an imaginary housemaid because "it would have been a social stigma to do our own work" and pretending to her first husband that she could control the servants and not they her - writing was both an outlet and easy with someone of her imagination and humour.

She married twice - in 1916 to Arthur Brownlow Denham-Cookes, to whom she had one son, Pip, born in 1917, and in 1925 to Charles Gower Robinson.